The Magazine

V.F. Portrait: Anjelica Huston

Born with great movie bloodlines, Anjelica Huston was the third member of her family to take home an Oscar, winning best supporting actress for Prizzi’s Honor—directed by her father, John—in 1986. At 60, writes Lillian Ross, Huston is focused on her role in Smash, a new TV series about the making of a Broadway musical, while playing “Auntie” to the next generation of her multi-talented clan.

WHAT’S BRED IN THE BONE Anjelica Huston, photographed in Goshen, New York.

Sixty years ago, before Anjelica Huston’s surfacing in the new television series Smash, she surfaced into this world at eight pounds 12 ounces in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Hollywood to father John Huston and his fourth wife, Enrica Soma. The mystery of great talent like Anjelica’s—whether in acting or other arts—is mind-boggling. However elusive to pin down, it seems to shine mightily in Huston and her family.

Anjelica followed her brother, Tony, by just over one year. Their paternal grandfather was Walter Huston, a theater and movie star (Dodsworth) and a knockout onstage in Knickerbocker Holiday, singing Kurt Weill’s “September Song.” In 1948 both Walter and his son, John, won Oscars (supporting actor for Walter, director and screenwriter for John) for their movie The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Nearly four decades later, John cast Anjelica in his 1985 movie Prizzi’s Honor, with Jack Nicholson, and she won an Oscar for her performance as Maerose. The following year, Tony Huston wrote the impressive screenplay for The Dead, based on James Joyce’s story of the same name; it starred Anjelica and was directed by John, the last film he made before he died, in 1987, of emphysema. The Somas, on Anjelica’s mother’s side, had their own eager interests in theatrical phenomena. Grandfather Tony Soma ran Tony’s Wife, a Midtown Manhattan restaurant popular with celebrities, where Tony, a yoga devotee, often greeted patrons by standing on his head and where John first met Enrica “Ricki” Soma, then an exquisite dancer studying with Balanchine, later under contract as an actress with David Selznick. Years later, Tony would train his grandkids to start every morning standing on their heads and singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”

Other Hustons: Anjelica’s half-brother, Danny, the son of John and Zoe Sallis (she played Abraham’s wife of convenience in John’s movie The Bible), is a regular presence in films (The Proposition, The Aviator, 21 Grams, X-Men Origins: Wolverine) and has been, like Anjelica, working in a forthcoming TV series, Magic City, about Miami Beach in the 60s. Anjelica’s nephew Jack Huston, the 29-year-old son of Tony, lately has been frightening TV viewers as a facially disfigured World War I veteran turned mobster in Boardwalk Empire. Jack’s older brother, Matthew, a director-writer, and sister, Laura, a production designer, work in the movie business in London. Anjelica’s half-sister, Allegra, daughter of Ricki and Lord John Julius Norwich, has written and produced the new independent movie Good Luck, Mr. Gorski. The Hustons continue to multiply and care for one another. Anjelica is the committed “Auntie” to Danny’s daughter, Stella, 9; Tony’s Jasper, 10; and Allegra’s Rafael Patrick Geronimo, also 9. Anjelica is also “Great-Auntie” to Matthew’s Noah, three. The clan descends joyously on Auntie on holidays, often at her 35-acre ranch, about 200 miles north of Los Angeles, in Three Rivers, California, where she keeps eight horses and a bunch of other animals, grows fruits and vegetables, and makes a lot of jellies and jams for gifts.

As toddlers, Anjelica and brother Tony were taken to live in a three-story Georgian manor house in St. Clerans, Ireland, where John—when he wasn’t departing to make a movie—reveled in putting on a red coat and white breeches and riding with the Anglo-Irish gentry on the hunt with the Galway Blazers. Anjelica learned to ride astride a horse, “and sidesaddle,” she says. “Dad liked to see women ride.” The two children were home-tutored at first. Their friends were all the pet dogs, cats, pigs, birds, and other animals—as well as the horses—on the property. Anjelica was sent to the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Loughrea. When the kids were pre-teens, Ricki moved with them to London, where Anjelica attended the French lycée. In 1969, Ricki was killed in a car crash in Strasbourg, France. She was 39 years old.

A few months later, at age 17, Anjelica went to New York with Tony Richardson’s Broadway production of Hamlet, as an Ophelia understudy. She had never taken an acting class. When she was 15, however, her father had put her in his movie A Walk with Love and Death. “A disaster,” she says. “I had begun to think seriously about acting, but this thing was all about him, not me. I wanted to be on my own. So I loved being part of Hamlet as a possible Ophelia. I was onstage throughout the run, as one of the women of the court, watching and learning.”

Then she switched to modeling, working cheerfully for three years for Halston and others.

In 1972, still modeling, she was staying in Pacific Palisades with her father and his fifth, and last, wife, Cici (Celeste Shane), when he went off to Morocco to film his adaptation of Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. Cici was sent John’s invitation to a party at Jack Nicholson’s house and invited Anjelica to go with her. She had seen Nicholson in Easy Rider and was a fan.

“Jack opened the door and smiled, and I fell in love,” Anjelica says lightly. “It led to 17 years of on-and-off togetherness. He had a great impact on my life. He’s a friend.”

In 1991 she met Robert Graham, the sculptor, and was greatly taken by a piece he had made celebrating the 1984 Summer Olympics.

“He was the first man who looked seriously at me,” she says. “His eyes were pointed at me. I just knew it was meant to be.”

They were married in 1992. He died, at age 70, a couple of days after Christmas in 2008, with Anjelica at his side. During the marriage, she took time to work, happily, with directors such as Woody Allen, Sean Penn, Wes Anderson, Clint Eastwood, and others. She says of her latest film, “It’s a special thrill to work in independent movies, like 50/50 with Seth Rogen and Joseph Gordon-Levitt and other young remarkable people.”

She still lives in Venice, California, in the comfortable modern home she shared with Graham, which he designed. “Great place to work,” she says. A noticeably original and very sharp and witty writer, she has been working on her memoir. (She has learned how to keep absolutely mum about it, until it is ready.) Recently, she has taken an apartment in Manhattan and has been focusing on Smash, her new TV show, which is filmed at a studio in Queens and on location around the city.

The series premieres this month on NBC and is produced by Steven Spielberg. In it, she plays a tough-minded, eagle-eyed Broadway producer, scary and magnetic, and uniquely attractive. “They work you hard, but it feels resurrecting,” she says of TV. “It goes faster than film. It’s refreshing to have a role actually written for me and to have writers working directly with me. I don’t know what’s going to happen from episode to episode. There’s a special energy to making each episode. Even the lighting is different. You don’t have time to dwell on minutiae. It’s challenging. You have to think on your feet. My character is going through a difficult divorce. She is both disagreeable and likable. She’s in that gray area. For me, that’s like life.”